Barna Report on Homosexuals Disputed

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, says The Barna Group spoke too cavalierly about what it called "homosexual Christians" in a recent report. The report, released June 22, was based on a survey of about 9,200 randomly selected adults, 280 of whom were self-identified homosexuals. Barna compared their questionnaire responses to those of heterosexual respondents on spiritual issues.

Among the findings:

-- Heterosexuals were twice as likely as homosexuals to strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.

-- Heterosexual adults were nearly twice as likely as homosexuals to qualify as born-again Christians according to a definition Barna employs.

-- About 40% of the homosexuals surveyed possessed a pantheistic view about deity – that "God" refers to any of a variety of perspectives, such as personally achieving a state of higher consciousness or maximized personal potential or that there are multiple gods that exist or that everyone is god.

-- Homosexuals assigned a lower priority to family and placed a higher emphasis on the importance of their lifestyles.

"People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts," George Barna said. "A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today."

LaBarbera took issue with Barna using the term "homosexual Christians."

"My test is to substitute another sexual sin and see if it makes sense," he told OneNewsNow.com. "Would we be talking about a survey of porn-using Christians or incestuous Christians? That sounds stark, but that's, I believe, the appropriate biblical analogy."

He also said Barna is naïve if he thinks the homosexual movement is not made up of "hedonistic Christian bashers."

"I think there are Christians who struggle with the sin of homosexuality – but proud homosexual Christians? That's an oxymoron to me in the same way as I would say proud adulterous Christians," LaBarbera said.

"And so, I think we have to be very careful because I see the tactic of the Emergent Church and the Christian left is to start talking more and more about 'gay Christians,' and what they end up doing is demonizing the so-called 'Religious Right' and saying that the Religious Right is all wrong in the way it has talked about homosexuality." [BP]